In Tennessee, Lighting a Path from Certificate to Degree

 “We spend a lot of time building guided pathways for our students in associates’ programs, but we don’t reach down to the vocational programs. What if we built something like a guided pathway between the two? A career pathway, with stackable credentials?”

Roane State Community College, a two-year public institution, serves a diverse group of students across nine campuses in East Tennessee. As is typical for community colleges, the reasons students enroll are varied as well—from academic goals like shoring up skills or transferring to a four-year institution to personal or career-minded goals like enhancing on-the-job qualifications or earning a professional certificate.

That includes students who also are studying at one of the Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology (TCAT), a network of 24 workforce-development technical schools across the state. Both Roane State, one of 13 two-year public institutions in Tennessee, and TCAT are run by the state’s Board of Regents. But until recently, little was known about whether and how students moved from one type of school to the other. The schools themselves don’t share data with one another, and no one was looking to see how many students were simultaneously enrolled or transferred from a technical school to community college, or vice versa.

That was the starting point for Jeff Tinley, Director of Institutional Research at Roane State, during his time as an SDP ECMC Foundation Career and Technical Education (CTE) Fellow. Before joining Roane State, Tinley worked in adult education programs designed to help non-traditional students earn a high-school diploma by passing the GED. With that broad understanding of non-traditional pathways as a backdrop, he focused his efforts during the SDP Fellowship on investigating how Roane State and TCAT students engaged in both technical and community college coursework.

Tinley gathered, analyzed, and created user-friendly presentations of five years of student enrollment and outcomes data that showed a considerable overlap between these institutions. From 2016 to 2021, more than 2,000 students that had enrolled at TCAT also had enrolled in at least one class at Roane State. That amounted to about one in 10 Roane State students during that time—most of whom were charting their own educational pathways without formal support, and with mixed success.

Community colleges and vocational programs in Tennessee are run “somewhat separately,” Tinley said. “Once people realize that they are serving the same students and that students are not always successful at navigating both institutions on their own, partnerships can take on a new urgency.”
 

Separate Schools, but the Same Students
Technical schools and community colleges in Tennessee may be governed by the same authority, but they operate in distinct and disconnected ways. Community colleges measure learning in credit hours, while TCAT schools measure learning in clock hours. Community colleges award degrees based on completing course sequences that they design and require, while TCAT schools focus on career-aligned coursework that leads to a certificate. Both types of institutions are accredited by different bodies, follow different calendars, and maintain distinct identities and visions of success.

Tinley’s research uncovered a consequential truth. Many students enroll in both types of institutions, transferring in both directions or even simultaneously, but much of their work at one school does not clearly carry over to the other. “Each transfer point is littered with unrecognized learning, wasted credits, and lost time due to the idiosyncratic requirements of each different institution,” he said.

This persists even as new physically co-located programs are taking root. For example, Roane State has partnered with the Tennessee College of Applied Technology Knoxville and Covenant Health, a local hospital network, to build a new healthcare training facility as part of a hospital expansion in Knoxville. Yet the college’s LPN-Mobility degree program, designed so students who are working as Licensed Practical Nurses can earn a more advanced, and higher paid, Registered Nurse credential and degree, does not grant enrollees any credit for prior studies or experience, Tinley said.

Meanwhile, these students were persistent at the outset of their studies, with 60 percent of students returning for a second year, whether they initially enrolled at Roane State or TCAT. An overall look at these students unearthed a somewhat surprising finding: more students started at Roane State and then switched to TCAT than the reverse. He focused on the 60 percent of students who were pursuing the health sciences. Of those, most students exited Roane State after they were not admitted to a competitive associates degree program, like nursing, and instead pursued lesser-skilled Health Science certificate programs at TCAT.

“My worry for these students is that they never find their way back to an associates degree program, either because they had a bad experience or burned through their financial aid, or because they were discouraged by one bad grade in their Anatomy and Physiology course,” Tinley said. “The federal financial aid structures for students looking for a ‘second chance’ and the academic requirements of competitive health sciences programs do not make it easy for students to find their way back after leaving Roane State.”
 

Looking for New Ladders
Tinley also looked at students who had started at a TCAT school and then attended Roane State.  As with the other group, most of the students that started at TCATs were studying and employed in the Health Sciences. These students typically work in entry-level jobs in the Health Sciences, such as home health aides and nursing assistants. He compared their outcomes to those of students who started their studies at Roane State.

TCAT starters struggled more academically and experienced lower rates of success than Roane State starters. Within three years, just 22 percent of students who started at TCAT earned an associate degree, compared to 29 percent of students who started at Roane State. The exact reasons why are not clear; a planned series of interviews will seek to identify common barriers to success.

Of this group of 350 students, 72 percent enrolled in non-competitive and less advanced Associate of Science (AS) degree programs, which prepare students to continue working in entry-level jobs or pursue further study in fields like exercise science and physical therapy. Just 21 percent began an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) terminal degree, which include competitive admissions programs like Nursing, Radiologic Technology, or Respiratory Care. In these programs, students earn professional licenses and enter the workforce immediately after graduation.

Supporting more students to earn degrees, and especially higher-skilled terminal degrees, is key, Tinley said. That includes ensuring that coursework carries standing credit, so students can earn a certificate and go to work, but with a clear path to return to their studies and climb higher on an established career ladder later on, as their personal lives permit.

“Especially in healthcare, with a lot of the entry-level jobs, people do make a long-term career from them, but it’s not an economically stable career. . .There’s a huge labor-market demand for these jobs. We can’t train enough nurses. And these are the types of jobs that people can build a life on.”

A new computer science program may offer an example of how such cooperation can work. It will offer dual admissions, with students registered as both Roane State and TCAT students. They will be eligible to earn industry certificates and earn credit toward a degree.

“There is a significant number of students who are trying to climb a career ladder, but they are not doing so great on their own,” he said. “We need to build a path to make that process clear. A TCAT student could follow a plan where they come in and do one program, then go out to work, and then continue going to school part-time and continue to develop. We need to tell them what wages they can earn along the way and why is it better not to just stop at a vocational certificate and go on to a degree. And for the students that start at Roane State and pursue training at a TCAT, which accounted for a lot more students than I expected, we need to make sure that there is an on-ramp back to more advanced training. Their decision to pursue an alternative form of certification should not mean they are locked out from pursuing an associate’s degree later on in their career.”
 

Implications for CTE Institutions
While technical workforce training schools and community colleges may be different institutions, they are serving many of the same students. Policymakers and higher-education leaders can learn from the SDP Fellow’s work to ensure that students can apply their studies to a portable, meaningful credential or degree—no matter which type of institution they attended including:

• Track and share student enrollment across institution types and among all schools in two-year and technical training systems.
• Look at student outcomes to identify common barriers to completion and intended pathways to career preparation.
• Translate credit-bearing work from one institution to the other, so technical studies can contribute to degree work and vice versa.
• Build established career pathways that allow students to pause, and then restart, their studies. Many students leave school with a technical certificate; reconnecting these students to community colleges, where they can build on that certificate to earn a degree, can promote economically sustainable futures for students and meet workforce needs.

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SDP Impact in Focus:

Who: SDP-CTE ECMC Foundation Fellow Jeff Tinley, Director of Institutional Research

Where: Roane State Community College in Harriman, Tennessee

What: Analyzed enrollment and outcomes data for students enrolled in coursework at Roane State and a Tennessee College of Applied Technology (TCAT), to identify how many students combine studies at both types of institutions and learn about their common pathways and rates of success.

Why: Students who earn technical certificates do not have a clear next step toward a higher-skilled credential or degree. High-skilled occupations, like nursing, are struggling to find enough qualified applicants to fill current and future openings. Exploring opportunities to stack credentials or ensure coursework counts towards a future credential or degree program can help Tennessee meet workforce needs while supporting more students to persist through educational programs that lead to family-sustaining jobs.

“We need to broaden the applicant pool to find incumbent workers or people who are starting on the vocational side. Providing a way for them to enter those higher-skilled jobs is incredibly important for their economic well-being and for our workforce needs.” – Jeff Tinley.

SDP thanks the ECMC Foundation for its support launching SDP’s first postsecondary CTE fellowship program.